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Stage: ‘Happy Birthday, Wanda June’

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the novelist and youth folk hero, has written a play. It is called “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” it opened last night at the Theater De Lys, and Mr. Vonnegut himself describes it as “a simple minded play about men who enjoy killine.”

Mr. Vonnegut Is a master of sophomoric wit carried to the pitch of graduate hys teria. He dares jokes that few out of college would risk, which doubtless makes him adored by students and en vied, perhaps even rejected, by those who have stopped studying. In part, his bril liance might be seen as ar rested intellectual develop ment, but he can be richly and often pertinently funny.

He has a sure instinct for the carefully considered ir relevance, and he sees sig nificance in the strangest of asides. There is much that is disappointing in “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” but a great deal of incidental hi larity.

The theme promises slight ly more than it can deliver. A new Ulysses, looking and sounding strangely like Papa Hemingway, comes home after years of wandering to his faithful Penelope and the son whom he has never seen.

This Ulysses is Harold Ryan, big game killer, big man killer, big woman killer (some of them by accident), millionaire, explorer, soldier, hero. He swears like an Off Broadway play, drinks beer and bourbon, carves off enough heads of animals to keep half the taxidermists of American off the bread line, and loves with the ferocity, and the possibly undue haste, of a water buf falo. He thinks he is no end of a fellow, and feels that with the right red blood in his veins a decent American can do anything—particu larly murder.

Harold has a friend, Col. Looseleaf Harper, whose main claim to distinction is dropping an atom bomb on Nagasaki. Harold's wife, in tellectual former car‐hop, once besotted with his bearded virility, learns on his return that his whole con cept of heroism, with its sexual roots embedded in nothing more rewarding than his insecurity, is more than she can accept. Yet he is an intelligent man, even a decent man, if a man sexual ly and socially maimed.

Mr. Vonnegut has an in teresting, although fairly ob vious, idea. By saying that heroism is out. and showing Harold as some kind of evolu tionary freak, obsolescent if not already obsolete, he can draw a most amusing carica ture. Harold and his pathetic sidekick, Looseleaf, there in Africa, had the chance of living on “blue soup,” some kind of lotus food promoting euphoric forgetfulness and peace. (No prizes are offered for naming the symbolic iden tity of “blue soup.”) Yet they put this away from them to come back to America, apple pie and violence.

Here they are confronted not only with a disillusioned wife, but also her suitors, a peacenik physician who be lieves in the power of words, and a silent majority vacuum cleaner salesman who finds a father‐figure in Papa Harold.

It is good enough for what it is, but what it is, is not good enough. This, though, is to discount Mr. Vonnegut's totally bewitching sense of the absurd, and the battered, baffled humanity of his sense of humor. There was not much I found to admire in the play, but a surprising amount to love.

Forget the vaguely porten tous message. Forget the creaky construction, the flip, trick ending, the dramatic workmanship so flimsy that its sole technical device is to expose its lack of technical artifice. Forget all this and listen to Mr. Vonnegut's small, quiet voice of inspired idiocy.

Normally I never steal an author's jokes to embellish a column, but Mr. Vonnegut has got so many I am sure he won't mind my borrow ing one as way of illustra tion. A character, in describ ing a beating, says: “Don't ever fight a guy when you've got on roller skates.” This is pure Vonnegut‐reaction hu mor. It is a keen perception of the ridiculous carried to sublimity.

Michael J. Kane's direction makes the play seem more of a play than it very easily could have done; Ed Witt stein's setting was attractive although a little too lower middle‐class suburban for its subject matter, and the act ing very good indeed.

Kevin McCarthy as the blowhard Harold, blustered, grunted and flailed with con siderable comic ferocity, giv ing the character more solid Ity perhaps than the play wright was able to suggest. William Hickey, a sweet shambles of a man who should be protected as a public monument, wanders through as Looseleaf with casual assurance.

I admired also the wearily comprehending Penelope of Marsha Mason, and the gung ho imbecility of Nicolas Cos ter as the vacuum‐cleaner salesman. All the acting was good and sharply defined.

Mr. Vonnegut has not writ ten much of a play, but he has provided a decently, sometimes indecently, divert ing evening.

A version of this archives appears in print on October 8, 1970, on Page 58 of the New York edition with the headline: Stage: ‘Happy Birthday, Wanda June’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe